Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear. As Mr. Bergmann said, it's an honour and a pleasure to be before the committee.

I'll start by saying that Russia poses the only existential threat to the United States and its NATO allies, including Canada, due to its nuclear arsenal, but that's a threat that's highly unlikely to materialize under current conditions.

I would argue that a more likely and still profoundly dangerous threat is a combined Chinese-Russian military confrontation with the west. That's also not necessarily likely under current conditions, but it's something that's much more conceivable than a Russian strategic nuclear attack on the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Russia is an acute militarized threat to the entire Euro-Atlantic area. It's an acute militarized threat to the U.S., Canada and all of our NATO allies. China is the only state, as the U.S. national security strategy says, with both the will and the capability to rewrite the rules of international order.

To be blunt, it's of vital national interest to the U.S., Canada and all of its NATO allies not to have to fight a war against China and Russia at the same time. The question then becomes how to avoid this outcome.

Currently, the most serious active threat to North American security, I would argue, is the war in Ukraine. If Russia wins in Ukraine, I'll paraphrase the words of someone who I consider to be one of our best Russian military analysts, Dara Massicot at the RAND Corporation, who says that if Russia wins in Ukraine, it will be bruised, vengeful and overconfident, believing it has bested the west.

To be clear, Russia is fighting in Ukraine, but it believes it's fighting against NATO, Europe and North America. Every time Putin has believed he's bested the west—in 2008 in Georgia, 2014 in Ukraine and 2015 in Syria—he has launched a larger and more ambitious war in the wake of that war. I think it is of important, if not vital, national interest to NATO states that Russia not win in Ukraine.

Also, what happens in Ukraine is going to affect China and it's going to affect the Indo-Pacific region, because both China and our partners and allies in that region are watching the outcome of the war in Ukraine to learn things about western tolerance for risk, western support of Ukraine and western support of partners and allies in other regions.

On the other hand, I think lumping China and Russia together as a singular threat, as you'll sometimes see western policy-makers do, is not in our interest, for a couple of reasons. One is that it obscures the major difference between them. Yes, China is trying to rewrite or remake the rules of international order. Russia, I would argue, is trying to burn the international order down using military power, whereas China, to this point, is primarily using diplomatic and economic tools.

The other thing about lumping them together as a singular threat is that it drives them together. The United States has been called the binding agent in that relationship. It's not for nothing that if we look at where China and Russia are most in partnership, it's in areas where the U.S. and, in some cases its other partners and allies, have the largest footprint—especially a military footprint.

The best way to avoid the outcome of a combined Russian-Chinese military challenge or confrontation with the west is to think hard about policies and actions that drive them together. That means thinking hard about where we deploy military power. Places like Europe and the Indo-Pacific are non-negotiable, because we have binding treaty commitments to our allies and partners there, but it's no coincidence that where our footprint is the lightest—in places like Africa and central Asia—co-operation between China and Russia is also the lightest. In some places, like central Asia, competition is emerging.

I'm at four minutes now. I will sum up by saying that another threat we need to look at, which is not in the military domain—it's more in the informational domain—is our need to strengthen our democratic and societal resilience throughout the west.

Russian election interference is something that's been going on for a long time. Very recent examples we can talk about in the Q and A are in Moldova and Romania. On disinformation, we need to strengthen critical thinking skills and consider ways to prevent Russia's use of our open societies against us.

Finally, on China and information, China has long used the information instrument to build a positive image of China, but it's now using more of Russia's methods, which are to discredit the idea of objective truth altogether and to discredit our own government in the eyes of our people.

I'll stop there.

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